His policy of treating Inntrepreneur as a property company rather than a drinks retailing operation came under intense scrutiny by MPs on the agriculture select committee in 1993.GrandMet has since stepped back from managing Inntrepreneur, although David Tagg, the international company’s property director, has been handling affairs during the hunt for a chief executive.Meanwhile, Inntrepreneur is struggling to keep pace with the rapid changes in the pub industry, mainly because it has been hampered by legal action from hundreds of publicans over terms contained in its 20-year leases.Brewing and pub industries are inexorably on the path to consolidation, and financially weak operators are in real danger of collapsing in the wake of advances from being made by other companies.Bass flexed its financial muscles on Friday, picking up the chain of 78 Harvester food pubs from Forte for pounds 165m cash. The number of Harvester pubs is expected at least to double in the next two years through conversions of large Bass houses.Food is the main driving force in the pub industry. Whitbread’s food turnover in the UK is second only to the McDonalds hamburger chain, and all the regional brewers draw 15 per cent of sales from selling meals.The Inntrepreneur company was born out of a breweries-for-pub swap merger between GrandMet and Courage. Inntrepreneur has an asset base valued at pounds 1.2bn but, despite banking facilities of pounds 800m, lacks the financial clout to compete with the big pub-owning brewers – particularly in the rush to sell more food.There is scope within the company’s banking facilities, however, to increase investment significantly. A quarter of the pounds 800m facilities is on roll- over terms, which means that Inntrepreneur can sell pounds 200m of pubs without repaying a single penny of its loans.The Inntrepreneur estate is slightly bigger than that owned by Bass, which will be toppled as Britain’s biggest brewer once S&N clears remaining regulatory hurdles to take over Courage.. All politicians agree that it would be a good thing if house prices start to rise again. This is very odd, since house price inflation does not make the nation as a whole any better off, and it makes a large slice of the nation considerably worse off.

Yet it is clearly a political taboo to suggest that it might be better for the economy to prevent house prices from rising. How do the links between the housing market and the rest of the economy really work? Obviously, a rise in house prices raises the real cost of acquiring extra housing services, so those households likely to increase their commitment to housing are clearly made worse off. Since these losses are offset by a gain for those who intend to reduce their exposure to housing in the future, the overall result is a large redistribution between generations. In simple terms, the old will gain from house price rises, while the young will lose.
Let us more formally split the population into only two age groups. The old are defined as the group likely to reduce its commitment to housing in the future, either by selling out completely, or by moving downmarket.

The young are defined as the group which either has no property at present, or which is likely to move upmarket in future. How do both groups react when house prices rise relative to the prices of other goods and services?First, on the surface, the old seem to have an obvious windfall gain to their immediate net worth, and they are quite likely to increase consumption as a result, relative to their incomes In other words, they will probably save less However, there is one question mark over this conclusion. Although the old themselves are better off, their heirs are actually worse off, since they will one day need to pay more for their housing. If the old are equally concerned about the welfare of themselves and their heirs, they will plan to increase the amount they bequeath to future generations, and this will offset the effects of higher house prices on the consumption of the old today.Meanwhile, the young have the opposite forces operating on them. On the one hand, they need to save more to afford the same level of housing in the future, while on the other hand they expect to receive higher inheritances from their forebears, which will enable them to save less.Overall, then, the theoretical effect of higher house prices on savings and consumption in the economy is unclear. In fact, if everyone is entirely rational about future inheritances, and if everyone fully cares about the welfare of all future generations, there should in theory be virtually no effect on overall consumption.